Author: Ben

Photo: Jarra and Terrace Awning

1.The Romanians

I was chatting today to two thirty-something Romanian guys who were cleaning a pool up here in the Sierra above Madrid. They told me something that interested me, that they would probably head back to Romania next year as the construction industry was going downhill so fast here that there was less and less work with the big contractors.

Plus the extra they did earn here compared to in Romania was hardly worth it these days, as prices in Spain continue to climb. “I’d rather earn 50 Euros less a week in Romania and live about the same”. I wonder if we’ll see a lot of Eastern European immigrants returning over the next few years.

2. The Ice Cream Seller

I was parking my scooter in Madrid the other day, next to one of those green plastic ice-cream and drinks kiosks you find on the streets of big cities. The owner appeared from the back and shook the remaining crumbs from an ice-cream cone bag onto the pavement. I was staring at him, so he looked up, smiled, and said, “It’s for the pigeons, they’ll probably all get diabetes. They need the extra sugar though, so they can, you know…”, and he slowly raised the index finger of his right hand and grinned, “…get it up and make lots more little pigeons!” Strangest conversation I’d had in a while. I must get out more.

[3. Conversation with myself]

[I had to delete a lot of unpleasant comments earlier this week, which made me think, “man, this place must be giving off some negative vibes, I can’t be doing with that!” Time to get back to the way things were, a return to the levels of Spain-loving positivity that actually drew complaints in the past, like the comment I found on another blog, “Notes from Spain is just too nice”. Hmmmm, feeling better already! Think I deserve a tinto de verano.]

Last night some friends and I were sitting in the front half of a drainingly hot, smokey, smelly bar watching Spain battle it out with Italy in the Euro-Copa quarter finals. In a large room behind us, 40 or 50 crazed supporters were watching the same game, on the same channel yet, infuriatingly, they were getting the signal 3 seconds ahead of us.

This meant that their ‘oooooooooh’s and ‘ayyyyyyyy’s would let us know that whatever was looking like an exciting dash towards the goal on our tele, was already another cock up in real time on theirs. Most annoying. Turns out they were watching an analogue signal on a huge old TV, whilst our plasma TV used the newer, but delayed, digital tuner technology. That’s the thanks you get for splashing out on a newer Television.

At half time we couldn’t take another minute of the the heat, smoke, and pre-emptive groans from the room next door, and went back to a friend’s house to see Spain eventually make it through to the semi-finals for the first time in a major competition in about 3,000 years. More of the same on Thursday!

In other (related?) news, classy on-line paper 20minutos.com reports that Spanish women are the most depressed in Europe (no doubt because their men are so obsessed with the football), whilst the men are the second most depressed after the British, and continent-leaders on the anxiety ladder.

Thinking this sounded unlikely (penalty shoot-outs aside, Spanish men don’t look all that anxious), I tried to google my way to the original article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, coming away only with this far more likely sounding article from 2001 in the Telegraph:

Liverpool worst city in Europe for depression. People living in Liverpool are more than twice as likely to be depressed as people in other parts of Europe … The lowest rate was found in Santander, where only one in 40 people was a sufferer.

Whatever the case, if Spain win when the final whistle blows against the Russians in Thursday’s semi-finals, expect half of Spain to become instantly, euphoricly un-depressed… followed by the other, more up-to-date half of the country with better TV’s three seconds later.

Many of you will have seen this already, but for those that haven’t, it’s worth noting a) just how a politician shouldn’t behave in pubic and b) the level of censorship employed on the PP-controlled TeleMadrid.

The first minute of the video shows TeleMadrid’s edited down version of Madrid President Esperanza Aguirre’s recent visit to a local hospital.

Jump to 1 minute 12 seconds to see the footage the channel was ordered not to show, where La Espe lost her cool …

http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=49235

Although there are signs of negotiation between the lorry drivers and the government that may bring the current Spanish transport strike to an end, food is still running out in the supermarkets. Luckily we got some staple foods in, just in case. See the video above!

Update: South of Watford weighs in, intelligently, and amusingly!

From the Independent:

“House sales have plunged, automobiles have tanked, and credit is throttled, but Spain is experiencing an unprecedented boom in books. Once the nation that read fewer books than any other in Europe, Spaniards have become voracious readers, devouring more books than ever before.”

It does seem that books are “in” these days. Certianly this week’s book fair in Madrid’s Retiro Park, pictured above, was so claustrophobicly packed with book-hunters that I could only manage 2 minutes of browsing before heading to the quiter corners of the park.

One thing I have always loved about Spanish readers is the care they take over their books. Often they are covered immediately after purchase, albeit with ugly brown paper, which makes it impossible to see what anyone is actually reading on the Metro. I wonder if this is becuase they are actually devouring “The Amorous Adventures of Don Libido”, but according to the Independent, literary taste these days is far more high-brow than that:

“Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s latest novel, El juego del Angel, soon to appear in English as The Angel’s Game, was published in April with an astronomical print run of a million, now almost exhausted. Ken Follet’s blockbuster World Without End, which is partly set in the Basque capital, Vitoria, has sold more than a million copies since it first appeared in Spain as El Mundo sin Fin last December.”

In other cultural news, I was shocked over the weekend to hear English coming out of our 14″ make-do-for-now TV. I rushed out of the kitchen to find that the cookery program being shown on TV1 was actually broadcasting a French guy speaking English without, as is the usual practice, overdubbing him badly with Spanish audio.

Instead, to my absolute amazement, Spanish subtitles flashed by underneath. Subtitles! When it is so easy to just turn down his English audio a bit and translate in Spanish over the top, leading to insanity for anyone who is acutally an English speaker and tries to listen to both languages at once.

They say that subtitles never caught on here either because there wasn’t enought literacy in Franco’s times to make them worthwhile, or because Franco could better censor the content of foreign films by cutting out the orginal dialogue and placing a censored version over the top. Perhaps it’s all this book reading that lead to their appearance on the cookery programme on Saturday night. In any case, I’d say strange times are ahead!